Her mind was not there in her room. It was still outside in the darkness, dreaming of Azula.
I wrote Molotov ten years ago.
I was unwell at the time. I remember that summer very distinctly. My year of depression, I took to calling it retrospectively. A canyon whose walls shut out the sky. At the time I couldn't see anything but the rock. I couldn't envision the future at all.
Now I live in that future, and I'm doing better in many respects, particularly as regards my mental state. But I feel strange, looking back at it. It doesn't feel like ten years should have passed. The time feels like a liquid spill, insubstantial, impossible to catch and put back in the bottle.
Molotov was the first complete long piece I ever wrote of which I was truly proud. I knew it was unlikely to garner much attention; the AtLA fandom seemed largely dormant and moored by nostalgia at that point in time, and Maizula in particular felt like a one-woman ship. A rowboat. And boy was I rowing. I wrote and edited with dedication more intrinsic than usual. My prior years of fanfic writing conditioned me to write fast and post soon, but with Molotov I waited, bided my time, ensured the shape and integrity of the whole before putting any piece of it out into the world.
And it landed, uh, quietly. While I had a handful of dedicated readers to whom I remain very grateful, the fic was roughly as popular as I expected it to be, which is to say it was not. I recall very clearly updating and trying not to obsessively check every ten minutes whether anyone was reading. I would subsist on an increasing hit count when follows and faves and reviews* were not forthcoming, hoping that those hits might bear the fruit I wanted.
*yes, I was primarily on FF.net rather than Ao3 at the time.
But I remained proud of Molotov. I wanted other people to love it as I loved it, but its muted reception didn't diminish my satisfaction.
And I moved on. The year got worse. The canyon walls narrowed. The purpose and structure that writing it had given me evaporated and I was adrift. Things got bad.
Things got better. I got better. I stopped idly thinking about offing myself. I wrote Hollowpoint and then drifted away from AtLA. I graduated college; I got a job.
Then, around 2020, the AtLA renaissance began. People started reading Molotov. People started reading Molotov in force.
(I wish I had kept better track of the numbers. But using the Wayback Machine, I more or less confirmed my suspicions: up until the renaissance, it had <15 comments and <60 kudos on Ao3. Today it has ~60 and ~460, respectively.)
And there I was, at an awkward remove from it, appreciating that it should have reached people but no longer invested in it the way I had been before. I could not appreciate it properly, I felt. I still feel that way.
I've written things since Molotov. I've written things now of which I'm more proud. I'm a better writer, I'd like to think. But more than any other piece I've written, it seems Molotov has resonated with people. More people have told me that it's spoken to them, reflected them, impacted them. And I feel I cannot appreciate this correctly. I wrote Molotov ten years ago. Now I write original work that will, I suspect, receive a similar reception to Molotov's initial debut, provided I'm ever able to get it into the wider world at all.
And for what reach Molotov has gained since 2020, its footprint remains modest. It's not even my widest-read AtLA fic.
And it's...frustrating, in a way. It's hard not to feel stagnant. Like I peaked a decade ago. Like nothing I produce will ever match up to it in some way, and it isn't even particularly impressive.
And like I shouldn't care. Like I should have moved on entirely.
But it nags me, that suspicion. Is that diminutive echo all that my voice is capable of?
I write this and I don't like that feeling. I want to appreciate it. I am lucky that my words should have reached, should have touched, anyone at all. I don't mean to disparage that impact.
But I feel that strange stretched distance, so much longer than it seems it should be, and I look backward and worry about the time I've spilled and the mark I haven't made.
Anyway! That's a terrible surplus of navel gazing. All I can do is continue to try, to throw words into the ether and hope someone else catches them sooner or later.
And if you've read Molotov, if you've liked it, if you've commented on it, I want to say thank you. Thank you for giving my words your time and attention. I mean it. And that me ten years ago, squeezed in her slot canyon, she certainly means it too.
